ARM Climate Research Facility: outreach tools and strategies

 
Poster PDF

Authors

Rolanda Jundt — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Lynne R Roeder — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Category

Infrastructure & Outreach

Description

Twitter is the latest social media tool being used by the ARM Climate Research Facility.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the ARM Climate Research Facility is a global scientific user facility for the study of climate change. To publicize progress and achievements and to reach new users, the ARM Facility uses a variety of Web 2.0 tools and strategies that build off of the program’s comprehensive and well established News Center (www.arm.gov/news). These strategies include: an RSS subscription service for specific news categories; an email “newsletter” distribution to the user community that compiles the latest News Center updates into a short summary with links; and a Facebook page that pulls information from the News Center and links to relevant information in other online venues, including those of our collaborators. The ARM Facility also interacts with users through field campaign blogs, like Discovery Channel’s EarthLive, to share research experiences from the field. Increasingly, field campaign Wikis are established to help ARM researchers collaborate during the planning and implementation phases of their field studies and include easy-to-use logs and image libraries to help record the campaigns. This vital reference information is used in developing outreach material that is shared in highlights, news, and Facebook. Other Web 2.0 tools that ARM uses include Google Maps to help users visualize facility locations and aircraft flight patterns. Easy-to-use comment boxes are also available on many of the data-related web pages on www.arm.gov to encourage feedback. To provide additional opportunities for increased interaction with the public and user community, future Web 2.0 plans under consideration for ARM include: evaluating field campaigns for Twitter and microblogging opportunities, adding public discussion forums to research highlight web pages, moving existing photos into albums on Flickr or Facebook, and building online video archives through YouTube.